By the time the Bush Administration left office in 2009, the Constellation program was grossly over budget and behind schedule-with a Government Accountability Office report that year revealing that a return to the moon, and a follow-on mission to Mars, would, by NASA’s own estimates, cost $230 billion by 2025. Bush proposed to pay for the entire program, which was called Constellation, by reallocating $11 billion from NASA’s cumulative five-year budget of $86 billion-a bargain, as space hardware goes.īut things didn’t work out that way. This would boost an Apollo-like Orion crew capsule the rest of the way to space and out toward the moon after the core stage exhausted its fuel and was jettisoned. The rocket’s second stage-which sits atop the first-would be a newly designed, upgraded version of the Saturn 5’s second stage. Flanking the core stage would be two solid rocket boosters borrowed from the space shuttle program. Its core stage-the backbone, and largest section, of the rocket-would be powered by six RS-68 engines-the same engines used by the private-sector Delta IV rocket. Rather than being designed from scratch as the Saturn 5 was, the Ares V would be made at least partly from off-the-shelf components. “Disposing of it is the best way to go, and that’s what we’ve chosen.” “The architecture we’ve chosen doesn’t allow for reusability,” says Jim Free, NASA’s associate administrator for exploration systems. That warning is especially persuasive in an era in which the private sector is competing with NASA to bring down per-launch costs and, regarding SpaceX, safely land and reuse boosters, rather than simply throwing them away after a single use-as was done with the Saturn 5 and remains the case with the SLS. “Relying on such an expensive, single-use rocket system will, in our judgment, inhibit if not derail NASA’s ability to sustain its long-term human exploration goals to the moon and Mars,” Inspector General Paul Martin told told Congress in March. It has taken 18 years to get a new moon rocket built, at a cost so far of $23 billion just from 2012 to 2022 and a per-launch price tag of $4.1 billion, according to a 2021 report by NASA’s Office of the Inspector General. Back to the Moonīut the SLS had a long history and a challenging future even before its recent launch woes. Read more: How Pittsburgh Is Leading the U.S. “The SLS is the start of a generational effort to return us to deep space and keep us there,” says John Honeycutt, NASA’s SLS program manager. Camping out on a celestial body that’s only three days from home is seen as an essential first step to learning how to live off the extraterrestrial land-a critical rehearsal for later journeys to Mars which, at minimum, is an eight-month trip each way. All of that propulsive power is required to launch the larger crew capsule and other payloads required for a return-to-the-moon program that will not only send astronauts moonward to explore the lunar surface for a few days at a time, but will also later be used to launch crews who will set up a permanent presence there. The SLS is a bigger beast, and it needs to be. Over the course of the following five years, nine Saturn 5s launched crews of astronauts to the moon. (3.4 million kg) of thrust, rattling the windows in the TV press booths and causing plaster dust to flutter down from the ceiling of the nearby launch control center. Until now, the Apollo program’s Saturn 5 held the record for the most powerful rocket ever launched. Scrubs and disappointments notwithstanding, there is no overstating the scale and ambition of the SLS. “This is part of our space program: Be ready for the scrubs.” We don’t go until then,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in a statement to the press after the second stand-down. That will push the inaugural launch until sometime in October at the earliest. Engineers are now fixing the fuel leak problem on the launch pad, but will likely have to roll the rocket back to its Vehicle Assembly Building hangar to recharge batteries that have drained during the long wait on the pad, and check for other potential leaks. The second was halted by a liquid hydrogen leak that prevented the rocket from being fueled properly. A lack of proper cooling could have led to the engine bell cracking or the engine itself shutting down. The first was called off after being plagued by a handful of problems-the worst of them a faulty sensor that falsely indicated that one of the main engines had failed to be cooled sufficiently for ignition.
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